I’m trying to find the best way to monitor my MS SQL server. I have been using pingdom for my web server and want to look at something else. I have done a lot of googleing but they all seem to be the same. Was hoping someone could tell me their good and bad stories that might make it easier to pick one. It is just for the MS SQL server. Just need to know [...]

Can someone give me pointers where to look in order to debug why this fresh install of Windows Server 2008 R2 with an untweaked MS SQL-Server R2 which is serving just one ~5GB db to 2 clients crashes once a week? (All updates applied, no other software running, no other roles. No Hyper-V, running on bare metal. Intel Core i5 660 @ 3,33 Ghz, 16GB RAM, 64bit Windows Server R2) UPDATE: I looked into the [...]

I have removed by accident SQLServerAgent account and now I cant get access to the database. Connecting from management studio throws me error 26 and system log shows: SQLServerAgent could not be started (reason: Error creating a new session). . I have googled out that’s cause of it may be lack of account but … how to restore it!? Create a new local or domain account (depending on your environment and its needs) and manually [...]

I have MS SQL 2005 Standard that is used actively (new data is added every minute). I need to transfer it to another server (new hosting provider), without losing the data and without downtime. Is there any way to do it? Replication seems like the most obvious answer; specifically Transactional Replication. Check more discussion of this question. Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Tweet about it [...]

I have a 180GB MOSS 2007 database whose maintenance (i.e. backups and restores) are becoming a problem. Part of the issue can be resolved by splitting the three content sites down into their own site collections, however this will likely still leave me with a 100gb DB to deal with. Whilst this isnt entirely problematic for SQL it does mean that backups / restores take far too long. my idea is to split each of [...]

Our database server has a maintenance plan which runs each night: Back up databases & logs (10-20GB max) Check Database Integrity Rebuild Indexes Update Statistics Normally this all executes in under a minute per database. However, in the last month there have been two instances where it just froze the database for 3 hours. The DBCC statement took 2 hours to complete, but completed with no errors. This whole time our database was rejecting connections. [...]

I have a fairly large table, which I have to keep up, with some very, very fragmented indices. This seems to be causing problems with performance. I would like to have neat fresh crisp indices on this table. I also have some rather annoying restrictions: 1. At no time can this table become unavailable. 2. I don’t have Sql Server enterprise edition (i.e. no online rebuilding of indices) What is my best course of action? [...]

We have some databases with index fragmentation that is > 95%. As best I can tell the indexes have never been rebuilt much less reorganized. In years. (In fairness, these tables do seem to have auto-updated statistics enabled. Also in fairness, he is diligent about backups: full daily and trx logs hourly.) When I asked, the DBA said he was reluctant to rebuild or reorg the indexes. When I asked why, he couldn’t really articulate [...]